Cultivating Happiness

— Two sides of the same coin

Dear friends, I took a long break from updating my blog. In the past three months, I traveled tens of thousands of miles, reunited with many family members and friends, visited various cities and exposed myself to a variety of rich experiences. If I tell you that all was dandy and relaxing, then I’d be lying. But exactly because of the wide range of emotions I was trying to manage during my adventure, this period has become the most transformative one in my life thus far.

I returned to my motherland for the first time in four years. Surrounded by family and friends who was part of my history, I felt connected to a younger version of myself again. I liken this experience to mature leaves returning to the roots of the tree that gave rise to their manifestation. Much of the confusion about my state of mind in midlife, core values, even temperament became crystal clear after I reconnected with the culture and upbringing I grew up in. This reflection in the “Magic Mirror” allowed me to see things much more deeply and as a result, I found the clarity, courage and wisdom necessary to reflect deeper inward. For once, I did not try to escape from uncomfortable feelings and negative emotions when confronting the darkest place in my heart, but rather I courageously took self-discovery to a higher level. What I learnt about myself during the process is the foundation and north star of my metamorphosis and this post is one of many in which I share about them.

To refrain from making this post too long to be useful to anybody, I will highlight the first and foremost insight I gained through my introspection. Surprise, surprise, it is about self-love. I know, it sounds so cliché as this notion is so ubiquitous in pop culture, self help books and the like that I started to wonder whether most of us took it for granted? How many of us took the time to ask ourselves critically what self love truly is, to what degree we exercise it and what impact it plays on our well-being.

Speaking from the journey of my personal growth, and literature review on a variety of related topics (right, I am still a nerd, ha), I now firmly believe that most of us lack sufficient baseline self-love, or put it in another way, we only bestow ourselves conditional self-love. This results in most of our emotional sufferings. Since we were young, our society, caregivers, educators, employers, friends taught us the importance of doing well, or more formally, achieving excellence. This notion by itself is not a problem at all. In fact, if you subscribe to Aristotle’s philosophy (which I do), the pursuit of happiness is a process of attaining achievements which leads to the perfection of human nature and enrichment of human life.

However, most of the context of “achievements” we were exposed to is more ego-centric, transactional and has the implied intent of “outperforming others”. We were pitted against one another, competing for scarce resources and prestigious positions. The external validation and perceived scarcity factor of this version of “attaining achievement” already determined its volatile nature. We are self-confident while on a winning streak yet self-loathe when we exhibit the first sign of vulnerability. We try so hard to escape from our life’s lows because we have not learnt how to make peace with ourselves and accept self under all conditions. That feeling of anxiety when you cannot wait to get over an illness, a spell of sadness, a stagnant phase of career, etc, is actually an indicator that we had forgotten (perhaps never learnt properly) that we are human beings and this amazing thing called “human experience” covers a wide spectrum of emotions, circumstances and should be regarded as a sacred gift to humanities.

So, in this world which is about to be changed forever by the AI revolution, in order to remain relevant, human beings will have to hold on to more of our human-ness, not only characterized by our creativity, spontaneity, compassion and altruistic nature, but also defined by our mortality, irrationality, limitation, imperfection, and a wide spectrum of emotions, including positive, negative and anywhere in between. It is critical to be intentional in cultivating a more humane society, to create a world where people support one other, celebrate each other’s ups and downs, or shall we say, cherish the human experience that no GPT agents are yet able to replicate. I hope not anyway, ha 🙂

Circling back to the topic of self love, the key point I wanted to make is: it is a big world out there, we are deeply connected to each other and the world. All the trouble and negative emotions you feel are shared by some other human beings (and there is even a term called “common humanity” to describe this concept) so we should never feel alone and abandoned. Having said that, you are the only person in this world who is with yourself 24/7, from start to finish, getting to know yourself better, accepting your good, bad and ugly, working hard to better yourself and fulfill your life’s purpose (after finding it in the first place) will fundamentally award you with lasting well-being.

So cheers, give yourself the grand love you are capable of giving, and remember, no one in this world deserves it more than yourself! Once you take good care of yourself, you can move on with your life’s mission to help and love others with your solid presence, unconditional compassion and uplifting spirit and optimism that serve like a light house in that dark dark vast sea.